President Joe Biden and congressional policymakers have proposed several changes to the corporate income tax, including raising the rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and imposing a 15 percent minimum tax on the book income of large corporations. The proposals are being considered to raise revenue for new spending programs and would repeal changes to the corporate tax made by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in late 2017.
An increase in the federal corporate tax rate to 28 percent would raise the U.S. federal-state combined tax rate to 32.34 percent, highest in the OECD and among Group of Seven (G7) countries, harming U.S. economic competitiveness and increasing the cost of investment in America. We estimate that this would reduce long-run economic output by 0.8 percent, eliminate 159,000 jobs, and reduce wages by 0.7 percent. Workers across the income scale would bear much of the tax increase. For example, the bottom 20 percent of earners would on average see a 1.45 percent drop in after-tax income in the long run.
Marin County, Calif., supervisors have allocated $400,000 to participate in a universal basic income experiment with the Marin Community Foundation.
The foundation plans to spend $3 million to give $1,000 a month to 125 low-income women for 24 months. To qualify, the women must have a child under the age of 18.
“The ultimate endgame for this demonstration project is to have an example of how cash aid can be really helpful in terms of alleviating poverty, to test the usefulness of this approach to addressing poverty and addressing some of the racial inequities that we know exist in the county and beyond,” Johnathan Logan, a foundation vice president, told the Board of Supervisors before the unanimous vote on Tuesday.
Author(s): RICHARD HALSTEAD, THE MARIN INDEPENDENT
Annual pension contributions from local employers in New Jersey come due next week based on the June 30, 2019 actuarial valuations. The state website only has the breakdown in pdf format but it was easy enough to export the numbers into excel for the PERS and PFRS plans.
Many local employers are also drafting their 2021 budgets so it was interesting to see what one of them (Union County) allocated as pensions costs for 2021.
I am not personally involved with the success or failure of these pension funds because I am not, nor do I have any family members enrolled, in either of the pensions.
The last report I saw (from 2019?) stated the City of Kankakee taxpayers’ annual funding of the pensions was at or close to $3 million. It would be nice if the “windfall” the city’s representatives receive would take some of the burden off the backs of the taxpayers of the city. Since it wasn’t included in the several ideas of the distribution of this “windfall,” I would hope that it could be. It would be wonderful to have this albatross removed from the necks of the city’s taxpayers.
If all pension providers would have been included in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), this problem would probably not exist. However, US Congress in its usual passing of legislation exempted all governments (federal, state, county and local). The federal law sets minimum standards for most voluntarily established retirement and health plans in private industry to provide protection for individuals in these plans.
Author(s): David Cox
Publication Date: 27 March 2021
Publication Site: Daily Journal of Kankakee, Illinois
While state and local governments cannot put their stimulus directly towards pensions, depending on how the federal government enforces this restriction, they will still have the leeway to free up money that can then go towards pensions (or be spent on budgetary items that have been cut in recent years due to growing pension obligations).
….
Public pensions will continue to use overly optimistic assumptions about how their investments will perform, accounting tricks that mask the true size of their pension liabilities, and underreport how much money is needed to fund them.
They will also continue to expose themselves to risky investments in order to attempt to shore up funding gaps. In fact, as the fiscal health of pensions plummeted following the 2008 financial crisis, pension plans only doubled down on the practice.
It turned out that, indeed, people varied widely in biological aging: The slowest ager gained only 0.4 “biological years” for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.
And by age 45, rapid biological agers were already showing some health indicators normally associated with old age.
Compared with their peers, they moved more slowly, had weaker grip strength, and more problems with balance, vision and hearing.
Differences in mental sharpness were clear, too, the researchers found.
Troubled by reports of COVID-19 running roughshod through nursing homes early in the pandemic, Jack Wheeler, the manager of upstate Steuben County, requested in April 2020 that the state Department of Health provide enough tests for every resident and staff member of three facilities in his jurisdiction.
The DOH, however, only came through with enough supplies for one of the three facilities, Hornell Gardens, with the precious diagnostic tests then hard to find, Wheeler told The Post.
That lackluster response came, as The Albany Times-Union reported last week, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo allegedly pulled strings to secure tests for bigwigs connected to his administration, as well as relatives including his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, and their elderly mother, Matilda.
The number of COVID-19 patients in France’s intensive care units has risen to a new high for this year, health ministry data showed on Sunday, as doctors warned a third wave of infections could soon overwhelm hospitals.
There were 4,872 ICU patients being treated for COVID-19, close to a November peak during France’s second wave of the virus, though well below a high of about 7,000 in April last year. The number of new infections fell, however, by around 5,600 to 37,014.
A group of 41 hospital doctors in the Paris region signed an article in the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche warning that they might soon have to start choosing between patients for emergency treatment.
Those developments are infuriating, and also enlightening as to how the system of the world functions these days, but the main event remains the race between new strains and vaccinations.
In America the race is plausibly close. Cases are rising, and likely will continue to rise for several more weeks, especially if vaccination rates continue to stagnate. But that acceleration should start soon, and at an additional 3% protection per week that grows and compounds, the vaccinations won’t take that long to turn the tide even if they don’t accelerate much.
In Europe the race is not so close. Vaccinations are running far slower, with no short term hope for things to get much better. The recent own goals only made a bad situation worse, and in many European countries things are looking quite bad. Lockdowns are once again the order of the day in many places, most notably Germany, and yet the situation is getting rapidly worse, in some places reaching crisis proportions.
There are some other problems with Mr Goldrick’s claim. First, he leaves out the actual headcount numbers behind the claimed 14% decline, namely a decline from 29,556 in 2010 to 25,830 employees in 2017.
Here’s why. According to the 2018 Valuation Report of the State Employees Retirement System (page 3) by actuaries Cavanaugh Macdonald, the overall unionized state workforce was 47,778 on June 30, 2011, just a few months after Malloy first took office and increased to 49,153 on June 30, 2018, six months before Malloy’s retirement.
How does Mr Goldrick turn a headcount increase into a workforce reduction? And why are the Cavanaugh Macdonald numbers about twice as high?
While offering no source, Jahncke claims that, “for more than a decade, state employee compensation has exceeded compensation in Connecticut’s private sector by about 40 percent, the biggest gap in the nation.” That unattributed claim likely came from a 2015 report by the Yankee Institute asserting Connecticut public sector workers earn 25-46% more than comparable private sector workers.
First, consider that the Yankee Institute is not a reputable source of research, but a right-wing, dark money-fueled, propaganda outlet associated with conservative North Carolina billionaire Thomas Roe’s State Policy Network. Roe’s particular objective, as revealed in Jane Mayer’s book, “Dark Money,” was the destruction of public sector unions.
In a meticulous analysis for the respected Economic Policy Institute, Monique Morrissey debunked the Yankee Institute report, revealing it was based on a cherry-picked sample of workers, used nonstandard control variables, and inflated the cost of retiree benefits in the public sector, while minimizing their cost in the private sector. Morrissey concluded that Connecticut public sector workers without college degrees are compensated somewhat more than those in the private sector, while those with college and graduate degrees are compensated somewhat less than in the private sector, even when factoring in more generous public sector benefits. In short, Morrissey writes, “taxpayers are getting a bargain!”
On May 8, 2020, Peru’s Ministry of Health approved ivermectin (IVM) for the treatment of COVID-19. A drug of Nobel Prize-honored distinction, IVM has been safely distributed in 3.7 billion doses worldwide since 1987. It has exhibited major, statistically significant reductions in case mortality and severity in 11 clinical trials for COVID-19, three with randomized controls. The indicated biological mechanism of IVM is the same as that of antiviral antibodies generated by vaccines—binding to SARS-CoV-2 viral spike protein, blocking viral attachment to host cells.
Mass distributions of IVM for COVID-19 treatments, inpatient and outpatient, were conducted in different timeframes with local autonomy in the 25 states (departamentos) of Peru. These treatments were conducted early in the pandemic’s first wave in 24 states, in some cases beginning even a few weeks before the May 8 national authorization, but delayed four months in Lima. Analysis was performed using Peruvian public health data for all-cause deaths and for COVID-19 case fatalities, as independently tracked for ages 60 and above. These daily figures were retrieved and analyzed by state. Case incidence data were not analyzed due to variations in testing methods and other confounding factors. These clinical data associated with IVM treatments beginning in different time periods, April through August 2020, in each of 25 Peruvian states, spanning an area equivalent to that from Denmark to Italy and Greece in Europe or from north to south along the US, with a total population of 33 million, provided a rich source for analysis.
For the 24 states with early IVM treatment (and Lima), excess deaths dropped 59% (25%) at +30 days and 75% (25%) at +45 days after day of peak deaths. Case fatalities likewise dropped sharply in all states but Lima, yet six indices of Google-tracked community mobility rose over the same period. For nine states having mass distributions of IVM in a short timeframe through a national program, Mega-Operación Tayta (MOT), excess deaths at +30 days dropped by a population-weighted mean of 74%, each drop beginning within 11 day after MOT start. Extraneous causes of mortality reductions were ruled out. These sharp major reductions in COVID-19 mortality following IVM treatment thus occurred in each of Peru’s states, with such especially sharp reductions in close time conjunction with IVM treatments in each of the nine states of operation MOT. Its safety well established even at high doses, IVM is a compelling option for immediate, large scale national deployments as an interim measure and complement to pandemic control through vaccinations.
Author(s): Juan J Chamie-Quintero, Jennifer Hibberd, David Scheim
